Yummy Yummy Stir Fry

Days to go: 13

We got the day off today. Days off around here are a mixed blessing. I wouldn’t trade one out just because of the negative shit, but its just not all smiles and lollypops when we get it. Days off are good for a lot of reasons. One good thing is that a whole day just evaporates. Disappears forever, disintegrates. You are off the streets for one day, you are one day closer to going home. Lately we have fired our weapons every time we go out. The violence and danger here just keeps escalating and we fight through the city every day and don’t even realize it. I think we’ve shot our weapons probably every day since Noah and I got back from Kuwait but I hadn’t really thought about it until now. That brings me to the down side of a day off. Its kinda hard to explain.. how it wakes you up and makes you feel all of a sudden. The stink of life gets pressed right into your face and you can’t turn away. Like being in a comfortable daze and falling into a bathtub filled with icy water. I am certain that this is some kind of combat fatigue or combat stress or something like that. Now while Im not twitching and shaking like a WWII trench soldier there is some funny shit happening in me. Let me try and explain what I see as the more physical effects of these awakenings. First of all for me they kind of build up all day until dinner time when it feels like I’m overflowing with shit. I sat there in the chow hall with Noah tonight basically all fucked up. You feel dizzy and like your head is throbbing. My skin feels like numb and tingles and I break out into a sweat (this may also be attributed to the stir fry, I make the dude cook it up extra spicy for me). You definately feel sick, and not just nauseated like some poor fucker in a Sartre novel, but sick like you’re about to throw up. You stare off into space and the world kinda bends around you. Sights and sounds become distorted and alien, you feel like you are totally wasted and totally sober at the same time. I tend to put my palms on my eyes when this happens because this somehow makes me feel better. When you walk its more like floating and you don’t give a fuck what is happening around you. You don’t give a fuck about anything. You could even drop your tray and not even try to catch it or look down as all the noodles and meat and broccoli explode on the floor. You wouldn’t even look back you would just keep walking out the door and continue on your day.

Noah and I talked about how tactics are basically useless here over our dinner. Sitting there in the chow hall of the damned forking away at the noodles in our stir fry basically making ourselves feel like shit. We talked about how this place is just one big roll of the dice. We talked about how we’re going to spend all our cash when we get home because money is no good to you when you’re dead. Then that always makes us talk about how death is inevitable and coming full speed for us. Then we bounce back to the main question ‘what the fuck are we doing here???’

Just one big roll of the dice. A dude asked me one time if I wanted to play some cards with the guys, my response seems appropriate now “I only gamble with my life”. Sad, but true. Chance, luck, probability are the gods we have to appease around here on a daily basis. There are certain superstitions that even though we are rational men we maintain. This makes me look differently at the assholes who worshipped golden calves and hung horseshoes from the barns and all other manners of ridiculous shit. One, we always knock on wood whenever anyone says anything about us being lucky or not getting attacked. Everybody usually jumps on the fucker who says it like he was blaspheming in church or something. Saying how lucky or good or healthy or skilled or anything else like that is totally forbidden. I can remember watching that movie ‘The Good Earth’ and how the Chinese people were saying their kid was born diseased and disfigured so that the gods would not strike down on them for pride or out of jealousy. That’s kind of how we see that kind of talk. Let me see, you never take pictures before a mission, that is beaucoup bad luck. You never talk shit about somebody who got attacked or what they did in the contact because everyone knows that the guys who talk the most shit the loudest get hit the very next fucking day. I don’t know, theres probably a bunch more but that’s all I can think of right now.

Combat stress is not unusual. Different people experience it differently. One main indicator is a total lack of patience with everything. Another indicator is extreme argumentativeness. Now, I’m no head shrink and these are my laymans evaluations based on my own experiences but I think they are pretty true. I have seen and experienced all this stuff before. My buddies back at Cockwater made a kind of saying about combat stress that actually involves me. Last time I was over here, like I’ve explained before on this site, it was total brawling with the insurgents the whole time. Stress was at an all time high for everybody. After months of this myself and some guys were down in Kuwait dropping off some State Department dudes and took the opportunity to get wasted for the first time since it all started. Well one thing leads to another and I ended up getting in a fistfight with a Canadian dude on the team. Everyone had a lot of animosity for this guy because of his lousy and continually decreasing performance and lack of responsibility so nobody was angered in the least if the dude should take a walloping. One funny detail from the actual fight was my first punch. It flew in like a rocket and landed squarely on the guys cheek sending him into a 360 degree spin before I resumed his beating. So the fight being over and the Canadian and I made up and are still buddies but I didn’t have a lot of pride in the whole thing. I mean yeah, he puked in my car and then told me to fuck off when I asked him to clean it up, but I lost control and alcohol was involved and it just seemed so fucking dramatic. I had to tell the story about 100 times and because I wasn’t super proud of myself I told people that it was just 2 guys relieving their combat stress. Somehow this transformed into whenever somebody needed to relieve stress they would say “I need to beat a Canadian” or “i could really punch a canuck right now” or something like that.

stressed out billy “boy oh boy Im stressed out”

johnny five “dude, you need to punch a canuck”

So you guys get the idea.

Changing the subject a little bit let me do a couple short lists. I think todays lists will be 3 things that piss me off today and 3 things that make me happy today.

3 things that piss me off today list 665: (in no particular order)

- People who have conversations not for the benefit of the other people in the conversation but for the benefit of everybody else in earshot. These conversations are for people who feel generally opressed or unheard to express their views on stuff to all the people who won’t listen to them or around them in a public setting. You can usually identify these conversations by the loud voices and the ‘pulp-fiction’ like descriptions.

- Speed bumps. There are way too fucking many of these over here and every one makes me just a little bit more miserable every time it bounces me around. The speed bumps over here are the worst you could ever imagine. First of all most of the roads are totally bumpy dirt roads or rotting blacktop with huge areas of erosion so they don’t really need more bumps in them. Second, they use old tank treads as speed bumps and they are meaty as hell. You try to angle it in, slow down, ease over the fuckers but there is just nothing you can do. Third, when they remove the speed bump after a few weeks or months because it has sunk too low into the ground to be effective they expose these trenches created by the sunken treads that are 10 times worse than the bump ever was.

- Girls at social gatherings over here. Now all these fucking people come over here and really try hard to make it just like stuff back home. Bar-b-ques and beer and games of horseshoes (or washers if you’re just a little more trailer park). Basically a lot of stuff looks to me like the shit most of these people would be doing on a Sunday afternoon back in the states. This in itself sometimes wears on me because people try and pull me into their “fun” (which I mostly don’t want to have anything to do with) but most the time this stuff is pretty benign. What really kind of sickens me is when you add girls into the whole mix. Then the whole thing turns into this primitive mating ritual or something. Every guy starts having the conversations like the first bullet on this list, puffing their chests out, making sweeping gestures and acting totally fucking stupid. It’s like the already low IQ average has dropped even lower. Watching these guys try every angle on these girls. Acting smooth, trying to seem intelligent, being overly courteous. BARF! The girls eat this shit up too.. they know they are the center of the universe at that moment and they savor every minute of it. I don’t really blame them, it’s a pretty good deal to be like 1 girl for every 100 guys over here. It’s just that the whole thing reminds me of one of those nature shows. You know.. the ones where they have frogs mating in a lake or pond or some shit. Like 30 little guy frogs crawling all over one big fat female frog. I think they call it a boil or something. That’s what it reminds me of and that’s what I think about when I’m watching it.

3 things that make me happy today list 667: (in no particular order)

- 13 days to go!

- 13 days to go!

- 13 days to go!

Ok.. I’m also posting some pictures I took today (one of my yummy yummy stir fry) and I think one or two may be from a couple days ago, can’t remember. Check em out.

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